


get well

by moondown



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route Spoilers, Harm to Animals, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Post-Time Skip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:00:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22838968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moondown/pseuds/moondown
Summary: “This isn’t a joke to me,” Felix says. Both versions he has of Sylvain — the Sylvain in dreams, the one here now, moving to lie properly on his bed — are the same kind of unlucky. Punished in the same, remorseless way. “Your life isn’t a joke.”“You’re always so worried I’m going to die,” Sylvain says fondly. “It’s sweet.”——Felix and Sylvain share a long night.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 9
Kudos: 126





	get well

Felix sits up, his dream heaved from his shoulders like heavy armor. No — something more amorphous than that: a dark shadow of a tropical leaf? a slow poison? In Faerghus the rats have been eating each other, leaving smears of their brothers in raided supply houses. Stains that dry black as frostbite and won’t come out of the wood. 

Anyway here is the dream, a stupid one. He dreams his brother alive. His brother is alive and so when Dimitri begs for Glenn’s forgiveness it doesn’t make Felix want to amputate his own ears and swallow them. 

Felix swallows, thick like cartilage. Head bowed, he listens for Dimitri’s low murmur through the wall, holds his breath to be sure of the silence. 

There is silence. Dimitri is like any other fucking god.

A thud — then, “Shit, _ow_.” Sylvain is like any other fool. Yes, lurching around in the morning’s early hours. 

Felix dreams about Sylvain, too. Always dreams him dead, always in some unbelievable and cruel way, always a punishment for something. While they’d been fighting separately on the same side, Felix would wake from those dreams and write Sylvain a message: _Don’t throw away your life_. There were dozens of notes like that, but he only ever sent one, and Sylvain’s response made him blush in front of the courier. 

What kept Felix from seeing the dreams as more than dreams was a brew of stubbornness, atheism, and a tiny hope that’s hard to kill. Even then he’d been relieved to see Sylvain at the monastery.

Even now he’s relieved, though he probably looks pretty pissed off when he opens his door. Sylvain’s an opaque thing in the dark that statues itself, then melts. A fuzzy crescent moon is hung up on the wall. 

“Stop smiling,” Felix says. 

“C’mon, Felix.” Sylvain breathes a laugh. “Play nice.” 

They try to decipher each other in the shadows. Felix’s gut heavies. He squeezes his door handle, a pump like a heartbeat, and tells Sylvain, “Come here.”

And Sylvain hesitates but he comes, slow, favoring his left side. Felix smells the blood before he sees it, the same smell as an iron blade. His nostrils flare. Sylvain says, “It’s okay,” right as Felix calls him a fucking idiot. 

Together, they go inside. Really Felix pulls Sylvain inside by his shirt, sits him on the edge of his bed. Then Felix lights his lamp after Sylvain warns him against lighting it. 

“Don’t want you to think I’m ugly.” 

Felix retorts, “It’s not your face that makes you ugly.”

Sylvain can’t cover the look fast enough. When Felix faces him, both of them haloed in the lush, private orange, he catches the ruins of Sylvain’s expression. Felix is stricken first by guilt, then immediately by anger, the two helplessly connected like an ouroboros. 

Felix exhales bluntly. The floor creaks under his weight as he eases closer. Sylvain’s swollen eye and split lip should make him ugly, yes. Felix lowers to a knee. 

Sylvain doesn’t try to defend himself. Never does. He just sits there, raw, letting Felix look at him. 

“What happened,” Felix says evenly. 

But all this commotion has woken Dimitri. Under Sylvain’s silence his murmurs seep through the wall, and then swell, tectonic. Sometimes Felix has a stupid thought, that Dimitri will collapse the rest of the monastery on his own — then what will happen to them, to their kingdom, that scrap of hope Felix carries on his sleeve?

“That’s not stupid,” Sylvain says. He braces the back of Felix’s neck, presses their foreheads together. 

——

This is what happened. Sylvain went to town and picked up the wrong woman. It turns out she was married but Sylvain swears she wasn’t wearing a ring. He says he looks for that first, for the ring, it would’ve caught the bar light and winked like a lighthouse as it turned its yellow beam over the sea, and she wasn’t wearing one. He’s not a total scumbag, Felix. 

Felix says okay, whatever, what next. Their faces are still close. It helps to hear Sylvain’s voice and his breathing, which muffles the rumble in the walls. 

Sylvain laughs hoarsely. You know what next. Felix says, after. After that. 

Her husband’s friend was at the bar, and he slipped out unnoticed through a back door. The air nipped his ruddy cheeks and elbows, but inebriated, he barely felt it. He was warm and his mind was foamy. His shadow unraveling long under the streetlights, he half-stumbled, half-trotted down the road like a lame horse. You see a lot of those in Faerghus right now, don’t you. Broken horses. They come into town with saddles empty and twisted on their backs, roped supplies dragging at their hooves, they’re limping and have wet, infected eyes. They’re useless like that, so they’re killed. 

They’re put out of their misery, Felix says. Tell the story. 

She wasn’t even that pretty, outside the bar. Sylvain noticed when he had her in the alley on her knees. He says he usually watches, Felix — watches their mouths stretch around him, but with her he closed his eyes, started imagining someone else. Guess who. 

No. 

You sure? he says. It’s kind of funny. But okay, here it is, he says. What you’ve all been waiting for. 

Sylvain didn’t even get to come before her husband showed up with his friends. It was comical at first, him trying to stuff his dick back into his pants and run at the same time. It was less funny when they drilled him against the wall. He didn’t have a weapon on him so he tried to fight with his fists, but he’s no good at close-combat, and he says to Felix, you would know. 

Felix says he knows. 

They had Sylvain on the ground in seconds. There were three of them and a fourth kept flitting in and out of his peripherals. 

Thinking on it now it was probably the guy’s wife, yes, he remembers, he heard screaming, but honestly? He couldn’t tell you if it was from his own mouth or hers. Or if somehow his insides were screaming. There’d be a lot less killing, he thinks, if a body could scream without a mouth, if every time the skin broke it wheezed, if a lung got punctured it garbled a wail. If no matter what you did the pain was loud. 

——

But if Sylvain is in pain now, he keeps quiet. He lets himself be helped. Felix has some healing magic, nothing worth a shit, just enough to seal Sylvain’s lip and ease the swelling around his eye. 

“Your hand is shaking,” Sylvain notices. Felix’s fingertips halt above Sylvain’s browbone and Sylvain croons, “Hey, relax. Listen,” and they sit quietly for a few moments. 

“I don’t hear anything,” Felix snaps. Then Sylvain meets his eye and he gets it. 

Soon the lamp flickers, dims, and goes out sudden as a gasp. Night drenches them both blue. Felix starts to rise but Sylvain catches him by the wrist. In the dark Sylvain can’t see his lashes open wider and he can’t see Sylvain’s expression, not really, just the rich glint of one eye, the other still bloated and shut. 

“Could you,” Sylvain breathes, “ — my stomach?”

“I won’t be able to see,” Felix says. The dark lowers his voice. Actually both of them have gone quiet, like everything between them is a secret, a dream. 

“Yeah.” Sylvain laughs softly. His fingers slip from Felix’s wrist so he can scrub his hair back while a burning sensation lingers on Felix’s skin. “Yeah, you’re right. You probably wouldn’t be able to help, anyway.” 

Felix stands there awkwardly, flexing his hand. No, probably not. He returns to his knee. 

“Oh,” Sylvain sighs.

“If it’s that bad, you need to go to the infirmary tomorrow,” Felix mutters. “Take off your shirt.” 

Sylvain starts to but then he hesitates. Felix tilts his chin, his brow hiked, and Sylvain can at least see that in the lightlessness. Felix asks wryly, “Are you embarrassed?” and the air whirs around his jaw when Sylvain retaliates, the shirt comes off. 

Felix looks and his face falls. He whispers, “Sylvain.”

“Yeah, I know,” Sylvain says. He’s leaned back onto his elbows.

The wound looks like a well: browning edges, a deep purple center. It shines under the light of Felix’s palm and seems to breathe out of time with the rise and fall of Sylvain’s breathing and it refuses to fade for his spell. This time Felix notices his own frustrated shaking. He exhales through his nose, jaw clenched against an unkindness. 

He closes his hand into a fist. The grey glow sinks into his skin like the sun into water. Light, no light. Felix’s eyes keep trying to adjust.

“You want to say something,” Sylvain snorts. “So say it. You think I’m a fool.” 

“You are,” Felix grits, standing this time without resistance. 

“What was it you said once? ‘The biggest in all of Fodlan’?” 

“This isn’t a joke to me,” Felix says. Both versions he has of Sylvain — the Sylvain in dreams, the one here now, moving to lie properly on his bed — are the same kind of unlucky. Punished in the same, remorseless way. “Your life isn’t a joke.” 

“You’re always so worried I’m going to die,” Sylvain says fondly. “It’s sweet.”

Felix turns away his face. “Don’t get comfortable,” he warns. “I’m not letting you sleep here.”

——

Yes, of course he lets Sylvain stay. He’s a haunting Felix has never been able to shake. Now he keeps sneaking his fingers into Felix’s hair and Felix is almost to the point of letting him, but not quite; he huffs and ducks away a third, fourth, fifth time. Sylvain will have to work for it a little more. 

“Come into bed,” Sylvain asks. 

“Leave,” Felix says from the floor. He’s sitting, spine propped against a wooden leg and the side of the headboard, his knees up and half-splayed in the net of his arms. All the room’s angles are unforgiving. “It’s my bed.” 

Felix listens to Sylvain turn onto his back, grunting, the sheets whispering back to him. He said earlier that the swelling had gone down enough that he could open his eye again so Felix imagines Sylvain looking at the ceiling with both eyes. Felix turns, tucking his chin to his own shoulder, to see if he’s right, or, yes, maybe just to see. 

Sylvain smiles at him. Almost painless. Felix has healed his mouth up well enough to kiss. 

Felix scoffs, louder than his blush. “Too bad. I’m not going to kiss you.”

Sylvain hums. “Yeah, too bad.” There’s a bad taste in his mouth, anyway. Coppery like the smell of dirt. 

Has he mentioned the time his horse reared unexpectedly, threw him off? It was in the middle of battle and his head hit the ground pretty good. Enough for the world to tilt sideways and ring like a swung bell. And he must’ve bitten his tongue or something because blood was just pouring out of his mouth. He’d sputter red out onto the ground and each gob would stay on top of the dirt for a minute, not instantly sinking, looking like rose petals. 

Felix lowers his face into the cavern his chest and arms and legs have made. “What does this have to do with the taste in your mouth?”

Almost nothing? Almost everything? Sylvain’s fingers come to rest in his hair. 

“I’m sorry, Felix,” he says. And he sounds sorry. 

So when the agonized groaning bleeds from Dimitri’s room into Felix’s, neither he nor Sylvain are startled by it. And they wade through.

——

After Felix gives Sylvain water, he kisses his baptized mouth. 

This is what happens. Sylvain squints at an oblong shape on the dresser for a while, and after the while passes, he asks, “Is that your canteen?” Felix says yes, so Sylvain asks if it’s full. Yes, it’s full, Felix says. Then should Sylvain assume Felix forgot about it through lack of sleep, or just that he hates him?

“Just that I hate you,” Felix says, and pushes himself to his feet to retrieve the canteen. 

Sylvain swishes the first and second swigs of water around his mouth before he swallows them. After that he drinks loudly, it’s so alive, his stomach so fucked up and still desperate for living. 

When Sylvain is finished he wipes his chin with the back of his wrist, screws the cap back on, and Felix reaches across him to press his palm down beside his ear. A canyon forms in the mattress under his knee. He hovers half-over Sylvain. 

Sylvain sighs a laugh. “You’re holding your breath,” he says. 

“Shut up,” Felix whispers. “I’m looking at your eye.” 

“Sure you are.” Sylvain lies the canteen on top of the blankets and then spiders his fingers over Felix’s knee. He coaxes him. “Baby, c’mere.” 

“It still looks like shit,” Felix says. 

“Are you mad at me?” Sylvain wants to know. 

This whole time Felix has been intentionally breathing. In, out, in, remember — out — the natural thing becoming unnatural. Now his chest burns. He huffs through his nose like a powerful horse, cutting his gaze to the side. No, being mad would be stupid. No.

Sylvain carefully cups the back of Felix’s neck. 

Felix’s voice softens. He asks, “Does it hurt?” 

“What, kissing?” Sylvain teases. Feeling Felix tense, he scratches his scalp, and goosebumps scatter through his hair, and Felix liquifies. “My eye feels fine. Apparently not doing my face any favors…”

And Felix gives him a kiss, an aloof one, their mouths barely pressing. Sylvain stretches his neck to deepen it. Felix exhales, then tilts his face for a better angle, catching Sylvain’s bottom lip in his teeth. He’s learned to be gentle in this. Sylvain needs everyone he kisses to kiss him like they give a shit. 

The bed sighs as Felix and Sylvain both shift to make each other more comfortable. Felix carefully straddles one of Sylvain’s thighs, a knee tucked between his legs, and bows over him without touching his stomach’s dark bruise. 

“I won’t be able to do much,” Sylvain murmurs before another kiss. 

Felix shakes his head, it’s okay, he doesn’t want him to. Sylvain slides his hand up Felix’s thigh anyway, his thumb dipping to trace the inner seam of his sleepwear. He revises, “I can do you,” and flutters the pad of his thumb over the outline of Felix’s dick, and Felix shudders, clenching down on his leg even as he snatches Sylvain’s hand and pins it to the mattress. 

The kiss breaks, Felix’s chest rising and greatly falling. “I’m good,” he says.

“Okay.”

Felix searches Sylvain’s face, distracted by the bruise fanning from Sylvain’s eye socket to his cheek and the bridge of his nose. The room’s blue is greying as morning creeps up, makes it easier to see everything that hurts more clearly. 

“You’re not ugly,” Felix admits. 

Sylvain laughs, soft as a match strike. “Goddess,” he murmurs. “You either.” 

——

Felix drifts into another dream between the minutes that Dimitri isn’t scratching the wall like a starved dog. Yes. Most dogs are starving in Faerghus, their owners too poor or too dead to take care of them. They turn over crates and attack each other for scraps, chew off their own paws to get at an infested itch, their scars weeping, lips peeled back. And even then, you’ll still occasionally find one that’ll come up to you, tail wagging. Searching for that brief, inexact love. 

Anyway, the dream. They win the war. Felix survives. Dimitri survives. Ingrid, Ashe, Dedue, Mercedes, Annette, Byleth — they all survive. 

Then Felix half-wakes and blinks and looks at Sylvain. 

He’s still with him, in a deep breath sleep, his bruise yellowing as it heals already on his face. Each blotch a canary feather. Yes. A tiny hope that’s hard to kill. 


End file.
